Speaking of evil times that should be remembered, the Halabja chemical attack is one that is already too easily forgotten.
It happened on March 16, 1988.
The regime of Saddam Hussein dropped bombs of mustard gas into the Kurdish city of Halabja, Iraq in an attack that lasted about five hours.
Nearly 5,000 were killed that day. And double that was injured.
I know that this looks like a blip on the radar compared to the likes of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot.
And even these numbers are small compared to the long history of Kurdish oppression in Turkey.
But that’s another story.
The Kurds have their episode too: Halabjah. As long as Kurds live upon the earth, so too will the memory of Halabjah. It was the event that reached beyond the censorship of Saddam Hussein’s regime to a watching, horrified world. It was the event that exposed the complicity of Western nations with one of the
most evil of history’s regimes. It was the event that made undeniable the years of the Kurdish genocide that had already occurred—long before Saddam Hussein rained hell upon Halabjah.
-Stephen Mansfield, The Miracle of The Kurds
